Most agencies price care plans by copying a competitor's page, then wonder why the margin disappears the first time a client's site gets hacked or a plugin update breaks checkout. Three tiers is the right number, but only if each tier is built from your own hours and your own tool bill, not from a feeling.
This post walks through the arithmetic, with the tool prices re-checked in October 2026. The dollar figures are examples to show the method. Swap in your own hourly cost and your own time logs.
Start with cost per site, not price per site
Before you name a tier, work out what one site costs you to look after in a month. Track three things for a fortnight: minutes spent on updates and testing, minutes spent on client email, and minutes spent on "quick fixes" nobody scheduled.
Suppose the numbers come out like this for a typical brochure site:
- Updates and testing: 25 minutes
- Client email and small requests: 15 minutes
- Monitoring, backups review, admin: 10 minutes
That is 50 minutes. At an internal cost of $50 an hour (salary plus overhead, not what you bill), the site costs about $42 a month in labour: 50 / 60 × $50 = $41.67. Tooling goes on top, and that is the part most people guess.
What the tooling costs per site at today's prices
Management tools price in two ways: per site, or a flat fee for a bucket of sites. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how many sites you run, so here is the same bill at 25 and 60 sites, using live pricing pages checked October 2026.
WP Umbrella is €1.99 per site per month (about $2.19), plus €2 for the security add-on and €2.49 for hourly backups if you want them. At 25 sites the base is $54.75; with security that is $104.75. At 60 sites it is $131.40 base, $251.40 with security. MainWP Pro is $29 a month, $199 a year or $599 once, for unlimited sites; it is self-hosted, so add whatever your dashboard server and your time to patch it cost. At $199 a year that is $0.66 per site at 25 sites and $0.28 at 60, before hosting. ManageWP charges per add-on per site (backups, uptime, client reports, white label and so on are each separate), with a $150 a month all-in-one bundle covering up to 100 sites; the per-add-on figures are line-itemed on our ManageWP alternatives page. WPClientHub is $19 for up to 25 sites, $49 for up to 100 and $99 for unlimited (limits raised 22 October 2026). At 25 sites that is $19, or $0.76 per site; at 60 sites it is $49, or $0.82 per site, and the per-site figure falls again as you fill the tier.
Two honest observations. MainWP Pro is the cheapest licence at almost any size if you are happy to run and patch the dashboard yourself. And WP Umbrella's base price beats the $19 Studio tier only below 9 sites ($19 / $2.19 = 8.7), so a freelancer with 4 to 8 sites should not pick a flat tier on price alone; from 9 sites up the flat tier is cheaper. The WP Umbrella and MainWP comparison pages go line by line, and the pricing calculator does the sum for your site count.
For the rest of this post, assume tooling of $4 per site: that covers a $19 or $49 management plan spread over 25 to 60 sites plus offsite storage and a form or SEO plugin licence. Your labour of $41.67 plus $4 is roughly $46 per site. Any plan priced below that is a donation.
The three tiers
Tiers exist to let clients self-select on how much risk and attention they want. They are not a menu of features. A structure that works for most small agencies:
- Essentials, $79 a month. The site stays up, updated and backed up. Nothing else.
- Care, $149 a month. Essentials plus a small monthly allowance of changes and a monthly report.
- Growth, $299 a month. Care plus priority response and quarterly improvement work.
Using the $46 cost from above, Essentials leaves $33 of margin per site (79 − 46). Care carries more time, perhaps 2 hours a month at $50, so cost is about $104 including tooling, leaving around $45 (149 − 104). Growth at 4 hours is $204, leaving about $95 (299 − 204). Check that arithmetic against your own numbers. If one tier's margin is negative, that is the tier to reprice or cut.
Notice that the cheapest tier has the thinnest margin in dollars but the best margin per hour of your attention. Essentials should be boring and mostly automated.
Worked example: 25 sites and 60 sites
Put the tiers on a real book. Say a 25-site agency has 15 Essentials, 8 Care and 2 Growth clients. Revenue is 15 × $79 + 8 × $149 + 2 × $299 = $1,185 + $1,192 + $598 = $2,975 a month. Labour at the hours above is 15 × 50 min + 8 × 2 h + 2 × 4 h = 12.5 + 16 + 8 = 36.5 hours, or $1,825 at $50. Tooling at $19 for the management plan plus, say, $50 of storage and licences is $69. Gross margin is $2,975 − $1,825 − $69 = $1,081, about 36%.
Now 60 sites: 36 Essentials, 18 Care, 6 Growth. Revenue is $2,844 + $2,682 + $1,794 = $7,320. Labour is 30 + 36 + 24 = 90 hours, $4,500. Tooling is $49 flat plus perhaps $120 of storage and licences, $169. Margin is $7,320 − $4,500 − $169 = $2,651, still about 36%. The tool bill went from $69 to $169 while revenue went from $2,975 to $7,320; on per-site pricing with a security add-on it would have gone from about $105 to $251 for the management tool alone. Tooling is not where the margin lives or dies at this size. Labour is, which is why the next section matters more than the tier names.
Put the limits in writing
The tier that sells is the one where the client can tell what happens when they email you. Vague plans ("ongoing support") invite unlimited requests. Give each tier three explicit limits: a response time (next business day for Essentials, same business day for Care, within two hours during business hours for Growth, and say business hours); a change allowance (none on Essentials, something concrete like "up to 60 minutes of content or layout changes per month" on Care, 2 hours on Growth); and what is excluded (recovery from a compromise that happened before they joined, new features, plugin licences).
Unused allowance should not roll over. If it does, you are running a savings account with your own hours as the currency. And if "client email" is eating the 15 minutes a site you budgeted, the fix is a ticket queue, not a price rise: see client portal vs. email.
Anchor on the middle tier, decide what you won't discount
Put Care in the middle and make it visually the default. Most buyers avoid both extremes, and the top tier exists partly to make the middle look reasonable. The gap matters: if Care is only $20 above Essentials, nobody buys Essentials. Roughly double between the bottom and middle tier forces the question "do I want changes included or not?" rather than "is $20 worth it?".
You will be asked for a lower price. Flex on term: an annual plan paid up front for two months free is a fair trade, and cash up front is worth real money to a small agency. Do not flex on scope or response time. A client with ten locations or a WooCommerce store taking real orders is not a discount conversation; it is a conversation about which tier they belong in, and the answer is usually the top one.
When to raise prices
Raise prices when any one of these is true. Your fortnightly time log shows cost per site has crept above a third of the Essentials price (at $79, that is $26 of labour, about 31 minutes). More than a quarter of Care clients use their full change allowance every month; they are buying Growth at Care prices. You have not raised prices for 18 months, so your hourly cost has moved and the tiers haven't. Or your waitlist is longer than your capacity to onboard in 30 days.
Do it in this order: new clients first, at the new price, today. Existing clients at renewal with 60 days' notice, 5 to 10 percent at a time. The monthly report is what makes that conversation short, because it shows twelve months of work the client had forgotten. Take payment by card through Stripe so the plan renews without an invoice thread; we covered that in productize care plans with Stripe.
Where this leaves you
Your care plan price is a function of your logged time, a tool bill you have actually checked this year, a target margin per tier, and written limits that let clients choose. Work out cost per site first, build three tiers that clear it, and fix the limits before anyone asks for an exception. WPClientHub handles the billing side through Stripe with a 0% platform fee on every plan; it is free for 3 sites, paid plans from $19/month, if you want to run the numbers on a real client site.